A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan brings her unique gifts as a novelist and short story writer to a compulsively listenable narrative that centers on Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and record executive, and the beautiful Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel of North Korea

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

American Pastoral

Philip Roth presents a vivid portrait of an innocent man being swept away by a current of conflict and violence in his own backyard - a story that is as much about loving America as it is hating it. Seymour "Swede" Levov, a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, and the prosperous heir of his father's Newark glove factory comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even a most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall ... a strong, confident man, a master of social equilibrium, overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful living out life in rural Old Rimrock in his 170 year-old stone farmhouse with his pretty wife (his college sweetheart and Miss New Jersey of 1949) and his lively albeit precocious daughter, the apple of his eye ... that is until she grows up to become a revolutionary terrorist.

Tinkers

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating.

Look at Me: A Novel

At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel - a National Book Award Finalist - a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes 80 titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image.

The Position: A Novel

In 1975 Paul and Roz Mellow wrote a best-selling Joy of Sex-type book that mortified their four school-aged children and ultimately changed the shape of the family forever. Thirty years later, as the now dispersed family members argue over whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children and their conflicts in love, work, marriage, parenting, and, of course, sex - all shadowed by the indelible specter of their highly sexualized parents.

The Learners

A young graphic designer fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy has just landed his first job at a wacky advertising firm filled with eccentric creative artists. Everything is going great until Happy is assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department. Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself.

Emerald City

These 11 masterful stories - the first collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters - models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls - are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations.

White Teeth

Archie's life has disintegrated. Fresh from a dead marriage, middle-aged Archie stretches out a vacuum hose, seals up his car and prepares to die. But unbeknownst to him, his darkest hour is also his luckiest day. With the opening of a butcher's shop, his life is saved and soon he is on his way to beginning a new life with a young Jamaican woman looking for the last man on earth.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.

The Keep

Two cousins, devastated by a childhood prank, reunite 20 years later to renovate a castle in Eastern Europe. The fortress has a bloody history that stretches back hundreds of years. Amid extreme paranoia and eerie silence, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results.

Christie L Goodman says:"Wish I could read it for the first time again"

The Corrections: A Novel

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

March

As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.

The Invisible Circus

In Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation.

Darling Jim: A Novel

When two sisters and their aunt are found dead in their suburban Dublin home, it seems that the secret behind their untimely demise will never be known. But then Niall, a young mailman, finds a mysterious diary in the post office's dead-letter bin. From beyond the grave, Fiona Walsh shares the most tragic love story he's ever heard---and her tale has only just begun.

The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer is about to announce his engagement to the docile May Welland when he meets her cousin, the mysterious, nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska. Edith Wharton's elegant portrait of desire and betrayal in Old New York earned her the first Pulitzer Prize for literature ever awarded to a woman.

Salvage the Bones: A Novel

Best-selling author Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for this poignant and poetic novel. Unfolding over 12 days, the story follows a poor family living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. With Hurricane Katrina bearing down on them, the Batistes struggle to maintain their community and familial bonds amid the storm and the stark poverty surrounding them.

Great Expectations

As Pip unravels the truth behind his own "great expectations" in his quest to become a gentleman, the mysteries of the past and the convolutions of fate through a series of thrilling adventures serve to steer him toward maturity and his most important discovery of all - the truth about himself.

The Keepers of the House

Abigail was the last keeper of the house, the last to know the Howland family's secrets. Now, in the name of all her brothers and sisters, she must take her bitter revenge on the small-minded Southern town that shamed them, persecuted them, but could never destroy them.

Arcadia

Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

Same Sun Here

Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City’s Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner’s son. As Meena’s family studies for citizenship exams and River’s town faces devastating mountaintop removal, this unlikely pair become pen pals, sharing thoughts and, as their camaraderie deepens, discovering common ground in their disparate experiences.

Let the Great World Spin

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter-mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in best-selling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

My Brilliant Friend: The Neapolitan Novels, Book 1

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila, who represent the story of a nation and the nature of friendship.

Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon

Garrison Keillor's latest book is about the wedding of a girl named Dede Ingebretson, who comes home from California with a guy named Brent. Dede has made a fortune in veterinary aromatherapy; Brent bears a strong resemblance to a man wanted for extortion who's pictured on a poster in the town's post office. Then there's the memorial service for Dede's aunt Evelyn, who led a footloose and adventurous life after the death of her husband 17 years previously.

Audible Editor Reviews

Jennifer Egan's several novels and collections of short stories have always been well received, and this book will be no exception. It is a novel, but each chapter holds it own. Like a devious love child of Colum McCann and Bret Easton Ellis, the whole fabric of these characters' lives slides together piece by ugly piece. Egan is a little less heart-wrenching than McCann and a little more moralistic than Ellis, but the total package here is one that will delight many kinds of readers.

The strange treat in this postmodern ensemble is newcomer narrator Roxana Ortega. A veteran of the soap opera scene, occasional improv comic, and supporting actress in films like Miss Congeniality 2, Ortega brings a surprisingly bold and wonderfully solid set of voices to Egan's cast of haunted characters. She begins all breathy and languid with Sasha, the eternally distant and bored kleptomaniac, but then draws listeners closer and closer, starting with the forlorn but gruff Bennie, once a handsome punk rocker and now an aging exec trying to stay on top of the scene. The most delightful segment is Ortega's deftly poetic rendering of little Alison's diary, which in the novel appears as a PowerPoint presentation.

Here's the thing about punk rock: there is always some kind of adventure around the next corner, until one day you wake up old, cold, and sold. This novel contains a lion trying to rip someone's face off, an autistic boy who collects songs that have moments of silence in them, a genocidal dictator taking photos with a burnt-out actress, a bag full of East River fish juice, a couple of wicked awesome lap steel and slide guitar solos, and a truckload of smartphone devices. As time marches forward, backward, and sideways in Egan's portrait of a once-cool music empire now dwarfed by modern technology and fading fast, Ortega gracefully jumps from generation to generation, wondering what went wrong for these people and try to help them get it back. Megan Volpert

Publisher's Summary

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2011

National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2011

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction!

Jennifer Egan brings her unique gifts as a novelist and short story writer to a compulsively listenable narrative that centers on Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and record executive, and the beautiful Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.

Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, but the listener does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other people whose paths intersect with theirs in the course of nearly 50 years, in settings as various as the San Francisco 1970s music scene; the demimonde of Naples; New York at many points, from the pre-internet 90s to a postwar future; and a catastrophic safari in the heart of Africa.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about time, about survival, about our private terrors and how we overcome them or don't, and what happens when we fail to rebound. Brilliant, sly, suspenseful, and always surprising - one of our boldest authors at the height of her powers.

What the Critics Say

"Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel." (Publishers Weekly)

This novel is made up of what at first seem like merely interlocking stories. The underlying theme is music and authenticity, and the way people in modern life cling to music as a way to hold onto what feels genuine. Some stories are set in the early 1980s, some are set in the future. In time, you come to see how the characters are more closely connected that they seemed initially. But each chapter still stands on its own, except maybe for one that's written in PowerPoint (yes!), and that one works a bit better in print. The narrator is fine, nothing special, but the novel really sneaks up on you, and it ends up feeling like it's about everything, in the way really great novels do.

I agree with other reviewers -- this narrator is OK but not great. But it doesn't matter how great she is, the PowerPoint chapter (12, second to last) is a failure in audio. It it is worth timing your "reading" to be near a computer for it. The on-line version available at the author's web site is in color and includes sound clips from the songs that are referenced and is by far the preferred medium for this chapter. The black and white PDF available from audible is much less entertaining and captures less of the author's intent. The audio version collapses into boring nothingness for the last 3 slides in the PowerPoint -- they are graphs, and the narrator "reads" every data point! This is ten minutes of meaningless tedium. The producers of the audio book deserve a big fail for not coming up with a better solution to that.

As to the book, my response was meh through much of it. I could recognize her talent as a writer, but found it hard to really "get into" disjointed stories that were about different characters and hopped around in time. After I got to the end (including the PowerPoint chapter) I could see what she was about, and liked it better on reflection than as I was going through it.

The title of this book refers to goon squads, which are used to attack and intimidate people. The author uses the title as a metaphor for time, which according to her is as ruthless as a goon squad. Time is a thug that steals your youth, energy, creativity and finally, your life.

This book is playfully structured like a record album but instead of 13 songs we get 13 intertwining short stories narrated by 13 different people. Because of the many narratives, it’s hard to summarize the entire book. Each story is a snapshot from a pivotal moment in a narrator’s life. Each character connects, in some way or another, to other characters in the overall story. The stories are not told in chronological order; they jump to different decades and different cities.

Many of the characters are disturbingly self-destructive; others are predatory and sleazy. The poor choices each character makes at a young age will steer them on sordid trajectories and the resulting repercussions will reverberate long into their lives as adults and old age and into the lives of their children. I realize this sounds extremely depressing but surprisingly, it’s not! In fact, at times, it’s wickedly funny. I attribute this to the clever writing of Jennifer Egan. The humor in the book juxtaposes the debauchery and it makes for a fast, clean read.

Every character in this book struggles with change, time passing and aging. The author accelerates and intensifies that struggle by presenting it in an industry obsessed with youth. The music industry revolves around the culture of youth. More than any other art form, rock n’ roll clings to a “live fast, die young” mentality. Don’t suffer through old age. At one point a washed up record executive’s daughter tells him, “This is the music business. Five years is five HUNDRED years.”

Our time here is short; we all have regrets, all of us. The one thing we all have in common is we are all going to get old eventually. Hopefully we will also grow up before we grow old.

Jennifer Egan (don't miss her 2007 THE KEEP) has created a map of trail-offs in A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. It's a study of once-connected characters' paths in, around and out of the curious corners of the b-grade music industry. These are compelling personalities whose respective journeys take darkening swerves past youthful dreams into some very grown-up ditches -- or just coast to sad standstills at bleak intersections. The problem in the audio presentation is Roxana Ortega's narration, which seems to be calculated as a mall-chick's dreamy reminiscence, a latter-day Valley Girl on a determined talking streak. She strays into the "many voices" effort, and her stereotypic stabs at male characters' voices hit you like blunt objects falling off a shelf of baseball trophies. She carries in some mispronunciations, too, including Ralph Fiennes' first name. So what do we need in a narrator? Listen to the work of Campbell Scott and Laurie Anderson, two of our most accomplished theatre artists. They read their books and respect their listeners' intelligence. They don't try to play each character, no cast-of-thousands arrays of funny voices, no overlays of "'tude" on the work. Clearly, Ortega isn't untalented. And it may be that she was directed toward this one-woman-show mistake. When did narrating a novel turn into a job for Anna Deavere Smith? Above all, note that Egan's book deserves a listen for its own serious merits. Don't skip A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD because of Ortega's narration, just "listen through it" whenever you can, to hear Egan's own eloquence at work.

This is one of the best books I have ever read (or listened to)! The character development is exceptional, and the interconnections between characters as the story shifts in time, is brilliant. The narrator is very gifted, making each character distinct. It is a complicated story and I had to listen carefully so as not to miss any of the subtle threads that connected the various scenes. Very, very well done. I understand why she won the Pulitzer for this one!

'Sure, everything is ending, but not yet.' This is probably, technically, a 3.5 star book, but I enjoyed it at the cellular-level, so I'm rounding up.

Positives: Great characters, interesting narrative, funky structure, great prose. Negatives: A little too self-aware. In many ways reading Egan is like reading a chopped up, skinny jeans version of Jonathan Franzen. In many ways that makes this novel better than 'Freedom' (a novel that shares a lot of 'Good Squad's' post-9/11, hipster-NY resonance) but not always.

There was one chapter that even reminded me a little bit of Chuck Klosterman and another chapter that gave me a sharp DFW vibe. Anyway, overall an enjoyable read.

This book is brilliantly conceived and almost perfectly written. Egan's her own person, but she reminds me of Veronica Geng as a comparable talent. What a treat is was to go with her into her imagination.

I couldn't finish this book. I tried to get into it--a couple times--but failed. I imagine that the things that happen in the story could, in and of themselves, be interesting, but the whole tone of the book is depressing and sorta pointlessly so. I assume the author is foreshadowing awful things, in fact she mentions awful, depressing things that will happen in the characters' future, but don't really care to find out what they are.

To be fair, I really never have been much good at enjoying self-centered characters and depressing events in fiction. (I don't particularly mind them in non-fiction).

I was mesmerized by the blase sexiness of this story. Ms. Egan's lyrical attention to detail perfectly describes the complex yet recognizable modern life of the handful of people we get to know from the Goon Squad. Great silliness and sadness--and Roxana Ortega is excellent as the narrator...truly speaks right into your ear.

You might recognize some of the stories from magazines. While the odd circumstances seem to standout, the stories to me seem to be about actual humans. The series of stand-alone but yet interconnected stories adds another level and forces the listener to pay attention. While I have heard better narrators, this one is not really that bad- very clear and not distracting which is about 90% of all I expect anyway. The only complaint was that in one story, her voice conveyed a very snarky female voice for what was a male narrator but otherwise competent.

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